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We were holidaying in Ahlbeck, a seaside town near the German-Polish border. It was our last night and we were in an Italian restaurant, waiting for the enormous pizza we’d ordered to go.

All of a sudden, a look of panic spread over LSH’s face, and he began tapping his pockets frantically. Then he emptied the contents of his bag on the table.

“I don’t have my wallet,” he said.

“It’s probably in the apartment.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Go back and check,” I suggested. “I’ll wait for the pizza.”

I couldn’t wait to tear into its cheesy, spinachy goodness.

It came moments after LSH had left. The heat from the box radiated through to my fingertips as I crunched through the snow back to the apartment. Giddy with greed, I expected to find LSH sheepishly reunited with his wallet, and ready to crack open a few bottles of the local beer we’d bought in Edeka earlier.

Instead I found him stony-faced.

“It’s gone,” he said.

We turned the apartment inside out, tearing open drawers, accessing nooks and crannies we hadn’t known existed. We even turned the couch upside down, as if we expected the wallet to tumble out with a guilty “alright, you got me!”

“I had it in Edeka,” LSH said later, miserably munching a cold slice of pizza. “I paid with exact change. I must have set it down when I went to pick up the bottles.”

“We’ll go back first thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “But until then there’s nothing we can do.”

“I just have to sleep it off,” said LSH, and went to bed, leaving me to nurse a flat regional beer.

The next morning the snow sparkled under brilliant sunshine. It has to be in Edkea, I thought, though I was careful to conceal my optimism.

The shop had just opened. A young man sat at the till.

“Good morning,” I said. “We’ve lost a wallet. And we think we left it here, on this very ledge, last night. Could you check to see if you have it?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Nope,” he said. “No wallet here.”

“Go to the department of lost items,” the customer behind us chipped in.

“Oh?” I said. “I didn’t know such a thing existed.”

“It’s in the town hall,” he said.

“This is very odd,” I said as we made our way down a long and narrow yellow-walled corridor, passing glass cases that featured posters outlining the requirements for passport photographs due to come into effect in 2004.

How LSH and I feel about women everywhere

“It is a sleepy town,” said LSH.

We found a door labeled “Office of found items” We could hear a radio on in the background.

We knocked.

There was no answer.

A young woman swept past us on her way into another room.

“Can I help you?” she asked pleasantly.

“Sure,” I said. “We’d like to declare a missing wallet.”

“You’re in the right place,” she said, sympathetically. “But the office might not open for another few minutes. Why don’t you just take a seat?”

“Thanks,” we said.

We sat down outside the Lost and Found office, and became aware of a male voice coming from it.

We agreed that this time it wasn’t the radio.

“I’ll knock again in a while,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, the same woman emerged again from her room.

“Still no answer?” she asked.

We shook our heads sadly.

Forty-five minutes later, during which time no one had actually entered the room, we knocked again.

“Come in,” said a gruff voice.

An old, bearded man was sitting at a desk. Judging by his expression, he was not happy to see us.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“My husband has lost his wallet” I said. “Has it possibly turned up here?”

“No.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. Perhaps we could report it missing?”

The request appeared to pain him.

“I’ll need your ID.”

“It’s in my wallet,” LSH said helplessly.

The man sighed.

“Perhaps I can give you my passport instead?” I suggested.

He agreed, reluctantly.

He typed my details – painstakingly slowly – into the computer.

I asked if I could provide an e-mail address so he could contact me if the wallet was handed in.

He squinted at the computer.

“There’s no box on this form for an e-mail address,” he said. “There has to be a box.”

“Oh, hmm perhaps you could just take a note of it then?” I asked.

He continued to gaze at the screen.

“Actually, there is a box,” he said. “So you can give it to me after all.”

It doesn’t matter what color hair they have, what month they were born or how long their nose is. Ask yourself instead: what do they desire? What have they been wrong about all their life? This advice from Lisa Cron’s book Story Genius came to me like a revelation. It changed everything.

On self-loathing:

When you are failing, look down at yourself like the deity of your choice would. Watch the hunched-over figure staring at her blank Microsoft Word document, and her 23 open tabs, ranging from ‘How to write a novel,’ to ‘How to beat your inner critic.’ Then laugh at the senseless misery you have created.

Laughing beats loathing. Take it from someone who’s good at both.

On time:

Unless you’ve got a magic stream of income or you’re certain you’re the next Stephen King, don’t quit your day job. Take a deep breath and accept that you’re never going to be able to give your novel the time it needs or deserves. That’s because in your head, it’s the most precious thing imaginable.

Full disclosure: I’ve gone months without writing a word of my novel. In fact I’ve only recently got back into it after a long absence. I had good reasons. Work was crazy, I was feeling anxious and a loved one was sick. Your reasons are probably better than mine.

But do you know what I didn’t do in my fallow period? Abandon the idea. If the idea of writing a novel is something that eats away at you at night, you have no other choice but to believe that it can be done.

On planning:

For every single idea you have, ask ‘why.’ If your story is about a little girl who loses her dog you need to answer the questions: why does she lose her dog? Why does it matter that she loses her dog? Why does she have a dog in the first place? If you answer these questions, you already have lots of scenes to write: the one where you describe how she loses her dog, the one where you describe what her dog means to her and the one where she gets a dog. All of these scenes will create their own ‘whys?’ Asking why helps you get to know your character’s back story. It also boosts your word count exponentially. ‘Why’ is a magic word.

On publication:

Don’t write to be published. Write because even though you hate it, the torment of not writing is worse. Write because it helps you understand. Write because it’s the greatest act of imagination in the world. Write because without stories, we are nothing. Write because you have no other choice. And when you have done that, to the truest of your abilities, show it to the world. And when it is rejected, rest easy knowing that you wrote for the right reasons.

Write because even though you hate it, the torment of not writing is worse.

“I look like I’ve been on a sun holiday,” Frau B said from her hospital bed on a Sunday evening in early January.

“You sure do!” I said, laughing. “Mallorca was it?”

She nodded conspiratorially.

Her skin had a yellowish glow, but it was difficult to know how much that had to do with the room’s artificial lighting.

There were two other women in the ward. Both attached to tubes and staring glumly at the wall in front of them, they seemed in far worse condition than Frau B.

“What do you need from the home?” I asked quietly.

“A pair of shoes for sure. The navy ones. My pink cardigan. The pocket mirror. A comb. Some hair slides. And I’m pretty sure there are still some grapes in the fruit bowl?”

“Got it,” I said. “I’ll bring everything over tomorrow.”

“Oh Katechen!” she said happily.

****

“She was in good form,” I texted to Frieda. “In fact, I think the change of scene has been good for her! They’re doing tests tomorrow.”

Frieda is Frau B’s next-of-kin. She’s in her seventies and lives in Hamburg. Until recently, she worked in the bicycle business, selling helmets to clients all over the world.

Their grandmothers were sisters but to keep things simple, they tell people that Frau B is Frieda’s aunt.

Frieda and I have met a few times and keep in sporadic contact. It was she who’d informed me that Frau B had been hospitalised.

“What a relief!” she texted back. “So glad you’re there.”

****

A few days later, Frau B was discharged.

When we spoke on the phone, her voice was wispy and her speech slurred.

She said something about cancer. I didn’t catch what exactly.

I asked her what she needed from the shops. The question stressed her.

“The usual, Katechen. You know yourself.”

I hung up and said to LSH: “It’s the beginning of the end.”

He looked up from his laptop, surprised.

***

I bought yellow tulips (her favourite), some grapes and a couple of pears. All safe bets.

***

I began visiting Frau B once a week nearly exactly five years ago. There have been occasional gaps, when I’ve been abroad, but even then we’ve spoken by phone. Her number is the only one I know off-by-heart.

We arrange the visits days ahead.

Each time, I’ve knocked, listened out for her two-syllable “Ja-a” and opened the door to find her sitting, waiting.

In the early years she’d been in her green armchair. Later, her wheelchair. Almost always in her Sunday best, she would watch me come in and take off my coat, then demand I come closer so she could take a look at the pattern on my dress.

“Nice,” she would say, tracing her fingers along the material. Or once, before Christmas about my woollen boyfriend cardigan, “it’s a good material but a little oversized don’t you think?”

This time, there was no reply when I knocked.

A bag full of red fluid hung from the side of the bed. Somewhere under her nightie she was attached to a tube.

She was making terrible rasping sounds as she slept.

I put the tulips in a vase and the pears in the bowl she’d inherited from her mother-in-law.

Then I sat there, watching her.

I’m not next-of-kin, and the information I was getting through Frieda was being drip-fed.

I took my phone out and went onto some forums. The yellow colour and the extreme rasping pointed to the final stages of liver cancer.

People who’d watched their loved ones die this way had thought to write about their experience and I was grateful for it.

***

I left the room to look for the care staff. They were in the dining hall serving lunch.

Temps from an agency, none of them looked familiar to me.

Like everywhere else, here too they’re understaffed. The pay is terrible; the job is tough and thankless.

“I’m a friend of Frau B,” I said, awkwardly addressing them as a collective. “She, erm, doesn’t seem well at all. I was wondering if anyone could give me some information?”

The faces looked at me, kindly and blankly.

This picture used to hang in Frau B’s room. It was her wedding gift to LSH and me. It now hangs in our bedroom.

They didn’t know her.

“Hanna should be able to tell you more,” one said.

Hanna is the head of the section. I know her.

“Thanks,” I said.

I couldn’t find her.

***

I continued, helplessly, to listen to her rasping.

I did some Googling to try and find out what the red stuff in the bag was. I wondered if it could be doxorubicin, a cancer drug otherwise known as the “red devil.”

(It turned out it wasn’t. It was actually a catheter containing her waste).

The rasps and gasps continued. I was terrified that Frau B would simply stop breathing.

Then, like a miracle, she woke up, just before they brought the food in.

“Hanna says you can come see her in her office if you have questions.”

“Thanks” I said.

I decided I’d feed Frau B first.

She was lying flat and didn’t have the energy to sit up.

I was a little worried about her choking, so I started with the mashed potatoes.

She ate them hungrily.

I moved on to the softened vegetables.

She ate them too.

She’s still got an appetite, I thought to myself. This is really good.

“Is there no meat?” she asked.

Never before has a vegetarian been so glad to hear the question.

“Of course there is!” I said.

I cut the chicken up as best I could with the spoon.

She wolfed it down.

I couldn’t find Hanna on the way out.

***

I began an all-consuming course at work, learning to operate a professional camera. We had class all day Monday to Friday. In our spare time we had to organise shoots. The weekends were for filming.

I went to see Frau B as many evenings as I could.

The tone of my conversations with Frieda began to change.

“Don’t worry about anything,” she’d said one evening on the phone as I was leaving work and making my way to the home.

I’ve taken care of everything. The undertakers. The room. It’s all sorted. You don’t need to do anything.”

“Thanks,” I’d said.

***

The last story I read to her was by our beloved Erich Kästner. It’s about a vicious snowball fight between pupils from rival schools.

I made an effort to read it dramatically. Commanding Frau B’s full attention was a challenge that when met, felt like a triumph.

This time, I succeeded.

“He writes so well,” she said as I closed the book for the last time.

“I know!”

I was pleased to have spotted Im Schnee, a collection of his winter-related writing, in the bookshop just before Christmas. Having read our way through the Lyrische Hausapotheke and Sonderbares vom Kufürstendamm, this was the perfect title to get us through a long Berlin winter.

After we read, Frau B requested I feed her some grapes.

“Be careful with the fruit bowl” she said as I approached it, adding significantly, “It’s in your interest.”

Over the years, whenever I brought fruit, I’d ask Frau B to hold the bowl as I placed the pears, apricots, grapes, or whatever else inside.

It had become part of a ritual, which I hoped reminded Frau B that this was a relationship – a friendship – of equals and not of one-sided reliance as she occasionally implied.

I’d often compliment the bowl, knowing that it would trigger an anecdote about her mother-in-law. “If only she knew we were still using her bowl!” she’d say.

“She’d be delighted!” I’d reply.

Perhaps, from where Frau B was sitting, it sounded like I was coveting it.

She wasn’t strong enough to hold the bowl now but she was certainly still interested in the grapes.

I popped them near her mouth and she caught them neatly like a fish.

“Just one more,” she said a few times.

Before I left that night she said, “Katechen, you’re going to laugh at me, but I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“When I’m gone, will you visit someone else?”

One of the managers had asked me that the week before, and I didn’t appreciate it.

Now, coming from Frau B it broke my heart.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “This has turned into a friendship. It wouldn’t be the same.”

***

When Frau B and I first met, I was a new arrival in Berlin, scrambling for work and unsure how long I’d be staying. LSB was abroad and I didn’t know many people in the city. As a result, I had plenty of time on my hands.

Five years on, LSB is LSH; together we have a coffee machine from Woolworths, a solid group of friends and far less free time than we’d like.

After he moved to Berlin, LSH, always impeccably behaved (unrecognisable at times), accompanied me on many of my visits to Frau B.

At first he sat mutely in the corner, reluctantly eating the creamy cakes Frau B insisted on saving for him. Then, as his German improved he was given a modest role calculating how much Frau B owed us for the shopping.

We called him “Der Rechner” (or “the calculator”).

His promotion was largely attributable to Frau B’s suspicion that I was undercharging her.

Much to her dismay, LSH’s bills didn’t come to any more than mine had.

Like this:

A few years ago, a large grey rabbit appeared in the hallway of the nursing home.

Residents would park their Zimmer frames and wheelchairs by its cage and stick their fingers through the bars.

The rabbit would twitch its nose in curiosity, and in response they’d exchange satisfied smiles.

Frau B told me it belonged to Alessandro, one of the care-workers. She said his girlfriend had thrown him out of the flat they shared and ordered him to take the rabbit with him.

This wasn’t true. But it was amusing, and so I went along with it.

I wasn’t sure Frau B really, truly believed it either.

Sometimes, when Alessandro came into the room, Frau B would say, “Here he is! The rabbit’s daddy.”

“It’s NOT my rabbit,” Alessandro would reply through gritted teeth. Then he’d slam the little cup that contained her painkillers down on the table and leave before she could say another word.

Frau B’s stories always had a dramatic narrative arc. When an old man named Mr Klein moved into the room next to her, she swore he was having a liaison with one of the women at her table.

She said she’d caught them looking at each other across the dining hall.

It was a most appealing tale which conveniently erased Mr Klein’s wife, who lives downstairs.

Still, I nodded indulgently.

As time went by, Frau B’s stories changed. They became less Mills and Boon.

She became increasingly paranoid.

The care-workers were coming into her room at night and eating her pears.

The cleaners were stealing her money and helping themselves to her jewelry.

The other residents were giving her dirty looks and talking about her behind her back.

She had deliberately been given a wheelchair with a faulty brake.

Frau B didn’t respond well to my attempts at gentle persuasion, so I mastered the art of deflection.

I’d listen as she catalogued the slights against her, then change the subject. I’d tell her about my friends’ love lives, or read to her from the Erich Kästner book.

For a while, it seemed to work.

But things are different now.

She insists that the staff hate her.

And that the people she sits with at mealtimes are conspiring against her.

She sits in her room all day, ruminating about their treachery.

As a result of these perceived slights, this year, she is boycotting the Christmas party I’ve accompanied her to for the past five years.

The one where one of her favourite care-workers dresses up as Santa Claus and distributes gifts to every single one of the residents.

When I suggested she may regret not going, she became angry.

I didn’t bring it up again.

Last Sunday, when LSH and I came to visit, we found her looking for money.

She’d hidden it envelopes all around the room and couldn’t remember where she’d put it.

I offered to help, but she refused, in a tone that suggested she thought I wanted to pocket it.

We unpacked the shopping she’d ordered on the phone the day before: pears; hair slides (the long ones; she can’t grip the shorter ones with her arthritis-ridden fingers); two bars of chocolate and baby powder. We’d also picked up her jumper from the dry-cleaners.

“Is that all?” she said.

“Oh?” I said. “Did you need anything else?”

“You know I did,” she said. “Why didn’t you get grapes?”

I tried to explain as politely as I could that she hadn’t asked for any.

“And what about the pine branch?” she asked.

On this, she had a point.

She’d been talking about getting a small festive centerpiece for her table.

I’d actually bought her one already. But when I’d arrived with it last week, I discovered that her niece from Hamburg had been around in the interim and had supplied her with an alternative. It featured a glittery cut-out of a reindeer wedged inside a box of festive vegetation.

Frau B preferred mine, but thought it would be too risky to switch them in case her niece came back. On her instructions, I took the little pot home back home.

Photo: LSH aka Andrew Hayden: instagram.com/andrewchayden

She did mention pimping her inferior centerpiece with a real pine branch. But she hadn’t brought it up again when I called, and – after a tiring week of getting up at half past three for work every morning – it had slipped my mind.

“So you’ve begun to exploit me too,” she said. “You think you can do what you like because I’ll forget.”

“That’s not fair,” I said, calmly.

“I told you I wanted a pine branch,” she said, her voice rising in anger.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get you one,” I said, curtly now. “I’ll get one this week.”

“You’re playing me for a fool.”

“Let’s read,” I suggested.

I thought it would help.

But she interrupted and said she needed the bathroom.

I let her wheel herself in and closed the door behind her – a small dignity she still insists on.

“Let me know if you need help,” I called after her.

LSH and I sat there, looking at our phones and whispering about how this wasn’t a very enjoyable visit.

Suddenly, a terrible cry came from the toilet.

I shot up and found Frau B hovering over the seat, clutching the bar with one hand and trying to pull her soiled underpants back over her knees with the other.

I re-inserted the sanitary towel that had slid down the inside of her tights, pulled up her underpants and tucked her vest into them.

Then she slid back into her wheelchair, and broke down.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “I can’t go on.”

I bent down before her, and looked her right in the eye.

“Today is a bad day,” I said. “Tomorrow will be better.”

“I’ve been horrible to you,” she said.

“Don’t worry.”

“I need to get out,” she said. “I need to leave this room.”

We left LSH in the bedroom to ward of the thieves and I wheeled her up and down the corridor.

When we came back, some of the darkness had lifted. I made up stories about my baby niece I knew would make her laugh.

Still, a heaviness accompanied LSH and me home that evening.

The next day, I called her on my way home from work.

“Who’s this?” she said.

She sounded agitated and I realised she would have to strain to hear me above the traffic.

“Das Kätchen!”

“Kätchen?”

“Yep, it’s me.”

“I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I just wanted to see how you were.”

“I’m feeling ashamed,” she said.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I treated you terribly.”

“It’s nothing.”

“And to think that after everything I said, you still call me.”

“I was worried about you.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“I often think I’m no longer capable of crying,” she said finally. “But the thought that there’s still someone who worries about me is enough to make me shed tears of joy.”

Now it was my turn to pause.

Then, in a matronly tone designed to stop me from welling up, I said: “Of course I care! How could I not?”

We hung up just as it began to drizzle.

As I walked on towards the train station, I imagined her watching the clouds form from her bedroom window, imprisoned in a cage she had a part in making.

Sometimes, when I am in the mood to expand my worldview, I follow people on Twitter whose views diverge from my own. It’s an attempt to get outside of my big, fat, liberal media bubble.

I thought you might appreciate that. But I was wrong.

You see, when your profile popped up on my timeline the other day, I thought: here’s someone whose thoughts I don’t hear at dinner parties very often. Your bio read:

“Voted for President Trump! Am NOT PC so if your feelings get hurt easy to (sic) bad. It’s why I block cry-baby liberals.”

The picture that goes with your account is of a middle-aged white woman with blonde hair. You’re smiling, but not in an unconditional, friendliness-for-all, Socialist kind of way. Definitely not like that.

Hmm, I thought. I wonder what kinds of experiences you have had and how they have shaped you into the non-cry-baby, un-PC, Trump-lover you are today. What, I wonder, would your bio have read before the era of Trump? And, also, are you a Russian bot?

I hit follow.

Not long afterwards, you wrote me this succinct note, and blocked me before I could reply.

If you had allowed me a few moments of grace, I would have asked you to clarify what you meant by:

“Go in your country” – back you mean? Go back to my country? To Ireland from Germany? Hmm, well, I could I suppose. But the thing is, the European Union has this thing called Freedom of Movement, which makes it legal to live and work in other EU countries. Kind of the way you’re free to move from one American state to another, except in our case, we can cross national borders legally. Crazy, huh?

Or maybe you were under the impression that I live in the United States? I don’t. I’ve visited a few times, but that’s it. So don’t worry. I’m not planning any type of liberal invasion. Phew! You can sleep easy!

“We just had another terrorist attack.” I think you were referring to the terrible attack in New York on Halloween, which left eight people dead. But there were many other terrifying incidents of recent gun violence you could be referring to. Perhaps terrorism is less scary for you when the attacker has the same background and skin color as you do? It would have been nice of you to clarify.

“Yes, enjoy your Muzzies.” – What are “Muzzies?” Is it slang for muzzles? An ironic comment on being muzzled by the politically-correct fake news media? Or are you actually referring to Muslim people? If so, I don’t really know what you mean when you say enjoy. Perhaps I might have found out if you’d let me follow you. Alas though, I’ve been Muzzied from doing so.

Anyway, I’d better get back to my bubble. It was a silly idea to try and break out.

Today, a far-right, xenophobic party became Germany’s third largest political force.

Pundits will point to the refugee crisis, the concurrent surge in right-wing populist sentiment elsewhere in the world, and the significant minority of Germans suffering from Merkel fatigue.

But these factors go only so far to explain how a party whose campaign featured slogans like “Burkas? We prefer bikinis” and “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves” could succeed in a country that, ostensibly at least, remains traumatised by the atrocities committed in its Nazi past.

One of many openly racist AfD campaign posters

One truth likely to be overlooked is that while the outrage may have been large, the resistance was not.

Protest setting off from Savignyplatz

This isn’t to say that there was no resistance; it just wasn’t as sizeable as you might expect.

On Saturday afternoon, on the eve of this potentially momentous event in German post-war history, a group of a few hundred people in Berlin did resist.

Draped in rainbow flags and carrying banners that read “Stop the AfD,” they gathered by a patch of green at Savignyplatz in the leafy, well-to-do district of Charlottenburg in the west of the city.

Then it was on to the Bibliothek des Konservatismus (Library of Conservatism) on Fasanenstrasse, an institution established in 2012 to house a collection of right-wing literature and serve as a meeting point for far-right sympathisers.

Another significant stop: Hardenbergstrasse 12, home to the offices of the Berliner Medien Vertrieb (Berlin Media Distribution) which manages the publication of the far-right weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit. If you are looking for an insight into their editorial stance, a current poll is titled “Sex attacks: Is Germany a safe country for women?”

The first half of the march passed without incident. The mood was largely one of joyful defiance, with police and protesters respecting each other’s boundaries.

This changed when the group got to Ernst-Reuter-Platz. The traffic junction, near Berlin’s Technical University, features a large patch of grass which all the political parties have used to accommodate their largest campaign billboards.

Some of these, including one featuring Merkel’s Social Democratic challenger Martin Schulz, had been defaced, with the word “NEGER” (nigger) strewn across it in large black letters.

When the protesters saw this, a handful of them reacted impulsively and slapped their Antifa stickers and posters over the offensive word.

In response, the police detained two of those responsible, accusing them of Sachschaden, or property damage.

Unsurprisingly, this elicited a furious response from the crowd. The protest ground to a standstill as angry demonstrators yelled at the police to let their friends go.

The word ‘Neger’ written across Martin Schulz’s forehead and face obscured by Antifa stickers and posters

A heated exchange took place between an old woman and a young policeman near the scene of the action:

“So you’d rather the word ‘Nigger’ stayed on the placard?” she asked.

“That isn’t the point,” he said.

“So how come the people covering up the racial slur get in trouble but those who put it there in the first place don’t?”

“They’re two separate incidents,” he said. “Both amount to property damage. Both will be investigated. Our job is to uphold the rule of law. That’s what we’re doing here.”

“Just following orders,” another protester interjected derisively, a thinly veiled reference to the defence used by those who co-operated with the Nazi regime.

The two men were eventually let go on the proviso that a report into the alleged property damage would be compiled.

The march eventually moved on towards its final destination on Otto-Suhr-Allee, a long, impressive boulevard that bears the scars of its bombardment during the war.

As the demonstrators made their way down the street, they encountered their first hecklers.

You had to look upwards to see them.

On a balcony on the second floor of a drab apartment block, two men and a woman were chanting “AfD, AfD!”

Locals chant “AfD, AfD” as protest passes them by

This unleashed a furious response. Protesters gave them the finger. And the trio responded in kind, clenching their fists and gesturing to the crowd as if to ask: “you want to come up here for a fight?”

The moment passed. But it was a strange and unnerving one.

This incident happened only a short walk away from the march’s final destination: 102 Otto-Suhr-Allee.

It’s the address of the Ratskellerrestaurant. Attached to the imposing historical town hall building, it has become a regular haunt for members of the AfD.

A row of police officers guarded the restaurant’s entrance as a member of the West Berlin branch of Antifa chronicled the Ratskeller’s history of hosting far-right groups.

Police officers guard the Ratskeller restaurant

In the 1990s, it allegedly welcomed members of Die Republikaner, a largely unsuccessful party that positions itself firmly to the right of the Conservative CDU and runs on an anti-immigration platform.

In the following years, it also supposedly hosted the so-called Tuesday Conversations (‘Dienstagsgespräche’), a closed event where members of the far-right exchange ideas.

The plan had in fact been for the AfD to hold its election party here on Sunday night. But, prompted – one can strongly suspect – by lobbying from Antifa, the event was called off on short notice.

When this news was delivered via mega speaker, a cheer erupted from the crowd.

But there was resignation too. The party would take place elsewhere and the Ratskeller was likely to continue to host the AfD’s regular meet-ups.

The protest ended with an announcement that Solitrinken, or “drinks of solidarity” would be taking place that evening to raise money for a Ghanaian asylum-seeker awaiting deportation.

By the time he leaves the country, the AfD will have entered parliament on an election program that identifies “a relationship between crime and foreigners” and describes an increase in the number of Muslims as a “threat to peace.”